simon p. murphy
12-18-2006, 10:08 PM
The company for which I worked was experiencing a substantial restructuring of internal policy. My rapid disillusionment with corporate life lead me to consider other avenues, and it was with mixed sentiments that I agreed to embark upon a foreign business venture with an old associate, Malcolm Elder, from whom I had heard nothing in many years. After a month of procedural obstacles, I finally freed myself from the worn channels of corporate routine and set out for Henke, a small but steadily growing town in the mountainous heart of the Caucasus.
Having a natural affinity for all things ancient and decaying, I was more than pleased to accept my old friend's offer to stand as a curator of rare books. The salary was less than astounding, but a broader view of my novel circumstances would reveal to even the least observant onlooker that I was much the happier for this change. The apartment I was comfortably occupying was attached to a generous garden plot, which I was tending without special hurry on a Sunday afternoon, when my business partner sent a boy for me with a mysterious summons. Our business did not usually operate over the weekend, although it was often the case that Elder or I could be found sometimes during this period occupied with updating our inventory or cataloguing recently acquired stock. I responded duly, and made my way to our shop which sat at a brisk fifteen minute's walk away. When I arrived I found my friend in an uncharacteristically flustered mien.
“You will be interested, I'm sure, to see what I have found,” he muttered, tugging me by my sleeve into the crack of the front doorway.
“What is it?” I asked curtly, feeling now no small annoyance at what I felt to be Elder's affected attitude of mysteriousness. He held out a small rectangle swaddled in linen cloth which he peeled away almost painfully, as if it were blistered skin, revealing within a darkish-red leather tome.
“This,” he began with a rare tone of admiration, “Is a first edition of Ludwig's 'Lamiae'. Bought for five roubles off an old saddler. Can you believe it? 1751, the seams still as firm as they day they were stitched.”
The 'Lamiae' was the earliest known text on the field that would later emerge as Parasitology, an area not so distant from the interests of Elder who wrote his dissertation on the mandibular structures of the European bookworm. This quaint discovery was all very interesting in its own way, but I confessed to feeling a little disappointed all the same. My friend derided me as though I had personally insulted him, but I didn't bother to explain. You see, my friend was one of those charming but unbearably optimistic types for whom the natural world occupies both ends of the spectrum of Wonder. Now, whilst being far from religious, I have always held a certain sympathy with the spiritual morbidity of the Old Religions. But Elder was a zoologist to his very marrow; his mundane field dominated the direction of his interests, hopes and passions in a way a lost soul like myself could only dream of. The man who is born driven in his quest for salvation must explore a great many dark and sinister paths, and for many travellers this horror demands the ultimate toll. And for this reason, I envied my friend's worldly complacency.
Now, for the sake of the reader, I should say that I had in recent weeks suffered from a kind of malaise in which I felt acutely desirous of something I deemed impossible. You see, no matter what old books we came across, I felt as if they were insufficient to satisfy my hunger. I at first considered this an antiquarian hunger, but realised that nothing of any age would suffice. What I desired, fundamentally, was something beyond my reach; something that could tantalise my ravenous appetite for the mysterious, and yet withdraw at the critical moment, refusing my slavering intellect of its promised feast. If this penultimate frustration were not put in place, then the object of my desire should be carelessly consumed, leaving me robbed of the divine state that is anticipation. Mystery is devoured by man's ravening curiosity, and as Wilde once wisely wrote, 'each man kills the thing he loves'. Only by this method, I adduced, could my sense of antiquarian wonder be sustainably excited over any period of time without simply collapsing upon its own revealed hollowness. And by a strange turn of events, I came to acquire this thing I so greatly desired, although, not without unforeseen difficulties. You see, along with Elder's cherished purchase of the first printing of Lamiae, he also bought an old diary which immediately captured my fancy to an unprecedented degree.
The book had been bought with several others of varying interest, and was a dark-green leather-bound volume, no greater in size than a large deck of playing cards. The spine was stamped with gold foil lettering that spelled out 'Rotchoir' - presumably the name of the owner. The most curious thing I found about the diary was that every single page was entirely saturated in black ink – not a single atom of uninked paper was visible between those covers. Despite Elder's reassurances of the book's worthlessness, I took the liberty of taking the small volume home with me. I had no immediate understanding of what it was that captivated me so about the small diary, although this I soon began an appreciation for as I leafed through its obsidian-black pages whilst eating my supper.
My fascination was sourced in the fact that anything that could possibly have been written was present on those pages, only in a form as yet indistinguishable. The meaning behind the madness, the true names of the stars, the secret of transubstantiation - should any of these exist, of course. All the same, it was fascinating to behold. As my eyes ran across those leaves of crumpled black, my eyes drank in the formless springs of undiminished Possibility. For days on end I devoured those all-telling pages. I missed appointments and avoided duties with unconvincing telephone calls, or more often than not, no word at all. Elder practically swore me mad, although I couldn't have cared less at the time. If it was a madness of which I suffered, then it was a 'divine madness' as the ancients would have called it. Anyway, why should the Oracle at Delphi have been labelled a visionary and seer while I should be a common lunatic? And so with an abyssal contentment, I pored over those omniscient pages, replete with the knowledge that the most incredible secrets of man and the gods were being drawn in by my thirsting brain, cryptically interlaced as they were with that pervasive inky darkness.
As the weeks progressed I noticed a new and wholly unusual development taking place – the more I spent within those ebon chasms of the Infinite, the smaller the volume had become. You see, the diary was quite literally shrinking, although by degrees almost imperceptible to me. The only reason this effect even caught my attention was because in the rare hours where I would snatch some sleep I would retire the book to a certain place on my nightstand, besides which rested a copy of Strunk and White's 'Elements of Style' which I had noted was of approximately the same size as the diary of Rotchoir. As the weeks went by, the edges of the diary began to recede within the already diminutive frame of this other book until it was approximately half the size it had been a month before. Of course this concerned me for several reasons, the foremost of which being that the book I so valued might recede into a state of nothingness from which it may never be recovered. The second reason, which in retrospect should have concerned me to a greater degree, was the agency of the so-called 'abnatural'. Books do not tend to naturally shrink by themselves, and even when it is the case that some item or other is reduced in size due to environmental exposure or wear, there is a distinct heterogeneity in this reduction, most often accompanied by a sort of uneven 'clumping' effect whereby certain areas will prove more susceptible to damage than others. The shrivelling of this diary, however, was one of almost perfect uniformity. It wasn't that merely the substance of the book was shrinking, but the inadvertent patterns upon the cracked leather, the spine, the stitching – even the red silk page-marker within had diminished accordingly. For these reasons I attributed the metamorphosis of the diary to causes beyond the sphere of Science.
For many days I found great difficulty in meditating upon my shrinking treasure, and in a matter of time, the tome was too small for me to even open. I had progressive trouble in locating the book upon my nightstand until one evening, when I had awoken from a troubled and disjointed sleep, I found my precious diary gone, swallowed up in the oblivion from whence it first sprang, or perhaps merely too small to be distinguished without the aid of a microscope. In any case, the diary was now beyond the scope of my senses. This blow had been less damaging to me than I had anticipated, and I believe the negative effect of this loss was partly mitigated by my expectation that this disaster would soon elapse, perhaps also partly from a growing apathy that the book itself had instilled in my general attitude towards life. Curiously enough, I found the power of the diary to be as strong within me as it had been in those first days when I had blindly plumbed the dark secrets of the unutterable Cosmos. Naturally, during the time I had been reading the tome, my readership elsewhere had waned to nothingness. Now burdened with the loss of my primary source of philosophic inspiration, I was reluctantly forced to turn elsewhere, and after several days beneath a dark fog of mild depression, I entered once more upon reading the books that once played so large a role in my life preceding my encounter with the mysterious diary of Rotchoir. It was then that I found that the spirit of the diary was not lost, and that in fact, it was in all likelihood that this gift had been bequeathed to me as a result of the book's unusual disappearance into the realm of the unseen.
The first book I tried to console my languishing curiosity with was Marius Dollglove's 'Anatomie Des Cogitans'. I confess that the experience of submerging myself was at first an unusual experience simply because I was by this stage so accustomed to gazing within the infinite swirls of black ink that filled the diary, but old habits soon enough find themselves, and I set to reading with a sentiment of tame and mundane contentment. It was by the third page that I noticed the gift the diary had left me.
Now, the reader might sympathise with a certain effect well known to many readers, especially prolific readers, whereby the eyes, when cast upon a page of text, will begin to form certain strange patterns as the hidden machinery of the mind labours to extract meaningful patterns from the feast of symbols laid before it. As the sentences coil against eachother, one might perceive streaks or smears suggested by a freakish grouping of spaces or some anomalous sequence of repeated letters. This effect was well known to me before, but was now very greatly pronounced, so that in the periphery of my vision I could discern very sophisticated and complex shapes and patterns, even words compounded of other words and letters. These were only ever perceptible just at the vary edge of my visual field, and to my acute frustration, never accessible to direct apprehension. It was as though the tenebrous secrets of the diary had been trancsribed to my mind's eye and then opaquely projected onto other texts that fell before my eyes - only these projections were never to prove comprehensible, although tantalising clues danced at the very edges of my sight.
And so to this very day, this maddening effect continues, so that I can no longer bear to read anything longer than a single sentence, because I know that the most shocking and profound secrets of the universe skate about my retinas like intangible will-o-wisps, fleeing before my sight and melting in my noetic grasp. So you see, in a round-about way, I actually found that for wish I wished – to be ever caught on the brink of a great cosmic revelation, only never to have the object of my affection destroyed by the disastrous taint of certainty. I suppose that what I failed to realise in making this wish was that the rules do not apply selectively – because this wish was fulfilled, I no longer care for its consequences; and so must every human project end.
Having a natural affinity for all things ancient and decaying, I was more than pleased to accept my old friend's offer to stand as a curator of rare books. The salary was less than astounding, but a broader view of my novel circumstances would reveal to even the least observant onlooker that I was much the happier for this change. The apartment I was comfortably occupying was attached to a generous garden plot, which I was tending without special hurry on a Sunday afternoon, when my business partner sent a boy for me with a mysterious summons. Our business did not usually operate over the weekend, although it was often the case that Elder or I could be found sometimes during this period occupied with updating our inventory or cataloguing recently acquired stock. I responded duly, and made my way to our shop which sat at a brisk fifteen minute's walk away. When I arrived I found my friend in an uncharacteristically flustered mien.
“You will be interested, I'm sure, to see what I have found,” he muttered, tugging me by my sleeve into the crack of the front doorway.
“What is it?” I asked curtly, feeling now no small annoyance at what I felt to be Elder's affected attitude of mysteriousness. He held out a small rectangle swaddled in linen cloth which he peeled away almost painfully, as if it were blistered skin, revealing within a darkish-red leather tome.
“This,” he began with a rare tone of admiration, “Is a first edition of Ludwig's 'Lamiae'. Bought for five roubles off an old saddler. Can you believe it? 1751, the seams still as firm as they day they were stitched.”
The 'Lamiae' was the earliest known text on the field that would later emerge as Parasitology, an area not so distant from the interests of Elder who wrote his dissertation on the mandibular structures of the European bookworm. This quaint discovery was all very interesting in its own way, but I confessed to feeling a little disappointed all the same. My friend derided me as though I had personally insulted him, but I didn't bother to explain. You see, my friend was one of those charming but unbearably optimistic types for whom the natural world occupies both ends of the spectrum of Wonder. Now, whilst being far from religious, I have always held a certain sympathy with the spiritual morbidity of the Old Religions. But Elder was a zoologist to his very marrow; his mundane field dominated the direction of his interests, hopes and passions in a way a lost soul like myself could only dream of. The man who is born driven in his quest for salvation must explore a great many dark and sinister paths, and for many travellers this horror demands the ultimate toll. And for this reason, I envied my friend's worldly complacency.
Now, for the sake of the reader, I should say that I had in recent weeks suffered from a kind of malaise in which I felt acutely desirous of something I deemed impossible. You see, no matter what old books we came across, I felt as if they were insufficient to satisfy my hunger. I at first considered this an antiquarian hunger, but realised that nothing of any age would suffice. What I desired, fundamentally, was something beyond my reach; something that could tantalise my ravenous appetite for the mysterious, and yet withdraw at the critical moment, refusing my slavering intellect of its promised feast. If this penultimate frustration were not put in place, then the object of my desire should be carelessly consumed, leaving me robbed of the divine state that is anticipation. Mystery is devoured by man's ravening curiosity, and as Wilde once wisely wrote, 'each man kills the thing he loves'. Only by this method, I adduced, could my sense of antiquarian wonder be sustainably excited over any period of time without simply collapsing upon its own revealed hollowness. And by a strange turn of events, I came to acquire this thing I so greatly desired, although, not without unforeseen difficulties. You see, along with Elder's cherished purchase of the first printing of Lamiae, he also bought an old diary which immediately captured my fancy to an unprecedented degree.
The book had been bought with several others of varying interest, and was a dark-green leather-bound volume, no greater in size than a large deck of playing cards. The spine was stamped with gold foil lettering that spelled out 'Rotchoir' - presumably the name of the owner. The most curious thing I found about the diary was that every single page was entirely saturated in black ink – not a single atom of uninked paper was visible between those covers. Despite Elder's reassurances of the book's worthlessness, I took the liberty of taking the small volume home with me. I had no immediate understanding of what it was that captivated me so about the small diary, although this I soon began an appreciation for as I leafed through its obsidian-black pages whilst eating my supper.
My fascination was sourced in the fact that anything that could possibly have been written was present on those pages, only in a form as yet indistinguishable. The meaning behind the madness, the true names of the stars, the secret of transubstantiation - should any of these exist, of course. All the same, it was fascinating to behold. As my eyes ran across those leaves of crumpled black, my eyes drank in the formless springs of undiminished Possibility. For days on end I devoured those all-telling pages. I missed appointments and avoided duties with unconvincing telephone calls, or more often than not, no word at all. Elder practically swore me mad, although I couldn't have cared less at the time. If it was a madness of which I suffered, then it was a 'divine madness' as the ancients would have called it. Anyway, why should the Oracle at Delphi have been labelled a visionary and seer while I should be a common lunatic? And so with an abyssal contentment, I pored over those omniscient pages, replete with the knowledge that the most incredible secrets of man and the gods were being drawn in by my thirsting brain, cryptically interlaced as they were with that pervasive inky darkness.
As the weeks progressed I noticed a new and wholly unusual development taking place – the more I spent within those ebon chasms of the Infinite, the smaller the volume had become. You see, the diary was quite literally shrinking, although by degrees almost imperceptible to me. The only reason this effect even caught my attention was because in the rare hours where I would snatch some sleep I would retire the book to a certain place on my nightstand, besides which rested a copy of Strunk and White's 'Elements of Style' which I had noted was of approximately the same size as the diary of Rotchoir. As the weeks went by, the edges of the diary began to recede within the already diminutive frame of this other book until it was approximately half the size it had been a month before. Of course this concerned me for several reasons, the foremost of which being that the book I so valued might recede into a state of nothingness from which it may never be recovered. The second reason, which in retrospect should have concerned me to a greater degree, was the agency of the so-called 'abnatural'. Books do not tend to naturally shrink by themselves, and even when it is the case that some item or other is reduced in size due to environmental exposure or wear, there is a distinct heterogeneity in this reduction, most often accompanied by a sort of uneven 'clumping' effect whereby certain areas will prove more susceptible to damage than others. The shrivelling of this diary, however, was one of almost perfect uniformity. It wasn't that merely the substance of the book was shrinking, but the inadvertent patterns upon the cracked leather, the spine, the stitching – even the red silk page-marker within had diminished accordingly. For these reasons I attributed the metamorphosis of the diary to causes beyond the sphere of Science.
For many days I found great difficulty in meditating upon my shrinking treasure, and in a matter of time, the tome was too small for me to even open. I had progressive trouble in locating the book upon my nightstand until one evening, when I had awoken from a troubled and disjointed sleep, I found my precious diary gone, swallowed up in the oblivion from whence it first sprang, or perhaps merely too small to be distinguished without the aid of a microscope. In any case, the diary was now beyond the scope of my senses. This blow had been less damaging to me than I had anticipated, and I believe the negative effect of this loss was partly mitigated by my expectation that this disaster would soon elapse, perhaps also partly from a growing apathy that the book itself had instilled in my general attitude towards life. Curiously enough, I found the power of the diary to be as strong within me as it had been in those first days when I had blindly plumbed the dark secrets of the unutterable Cosmos. Naturally, during the time I had been reading the tome, my readership elsewhere had waned to nothingness. Now burdened with the loss of my primary source of philosophic inspiration, I was reluctantly forced to turn elsewhere, and after several days beneath a dark fog of mild depression, I entered once more upon reading the books that once played so large a role in my life preceding my encounter with the mysterious diary of Rotchoir. It was then that I found that the spirit of the diary was not lost, and that in fact, it was in all likelihood that this gift had been bequeathed to me as a result of the book's unusual disappearance into the realm of the unseen.
The first book I tried to console my languishing curiosity with was Marius Dollglove's 'Anatomie Des Cogitans'. I confess that the experience of submerging myself was at first an unusual experience simply because I was by this stage so accustomed to gazing within the infinite swirls of black ink that filled the diary, but old habits soon enough find themselves, and I set to reading with a sentiment of tame and mundane contentment. It was by the third page that I noticed the gift the diary had left me.
Now, the reader might sympathise with a certain effect well known to many readers, especially prolific readers, whereby the eyes, when cast upon a page of text, will begin to form certain strange patterns as the hidden machinery of the mind labours to extract meaningful patterns from the feast of symbols laid before it. As the sentences coil against eachother, one might perceive streaks or smears suggested by a freakish grouping of spaces or some anomalous sequence of repeated letters. This effect was well known to me before, but was now very greatly pronounced, so that in the periphery of my vision I could discern very sophisticated and complex shapes and patterns, even words compounded of other words and letters. These were only ever perceptible just at the vary edge of my visual field, and to my acute frustration, never accessible to direct apprehension. It was as though the tenebrous secrets of the diary had been trancsribed to my mind's eye and then opaquely projected onto other texts that fell before my eyes - only these projections were never to prove comprehensible, although tantalising clues danced at the very edges of my sight.
And so to this very day, this maddening effect continues, so that I can no longer bear to read anything longer than a single sentence, because I know that the most shocking and profound secrets of the universe skate about my retinas like intangible will-o-wisps, fleeing before my sight and melting in my noetic grasp. So you see, in a round-about way, I actually found that for wish I wished – to be ever caught on the brink of a great cosmic revelation, only never to have the object of my affection destroyed by the disastrous taint of certainty. I suppose that what I failed to realise in making this wish was that the rules do not apply selectively – because this wish was fulfilled, I no longer care for its consequences; and so must every human project end.